ESD: Power, politics, and policy: “Tragic optimism” from Latin America

In light of the challenging developmental issues confronting the countries of Latin America, this response article analyzes the power and resistance of education for sustainable development from both theoretical and policy perspectives. Of particular concern are the neo-productivist strategies driving the latest stage of capitalist development. This needed discussion about education and development fluctuates between necessity and contingency. Derrida's concept of the “constitutive outside” accounts for how existing tensions within education for sustainable development inform the need for new identification models that are open, unsteady, incomplete, and relational. The constitutive outside also recovers the notion of “tragic optimism” (Santos, 2009 Santos, B. S. (2009). Una epistemología del sur: La reinvención del conocimiento y la emancipación social [An epistemology of the South: The reinvention of knowledge and social emancipation]. Buenos Aires, Argentina: CLACSO-Siglo XXI eds. [Google Scholar]) for clarifying the complexity of the struggle for emancipation and the confidence of the human capacity to create horizons of possibility. This confidence and capacity cannot be objectified from the impossible discourse (and palimpsest) of the texts/policies of education for sustainable development.